About a month ago, I posted about the Baigent/Leigh lawsuit over The DaVinci Code – Calling Mr. Holinshed. The other day Kenneth Hite posted much more extensively and informatively on the subject. Though equally as dismissive of B & L as I am, Mr. Hite is less sympathetic to Code author Dan Brown than I, deeming Mr. Brown a “hack.” Perhaps. But a hack is not such an easy thing to be. Many try, but few with remotely the success of Dan Brown. I am not being entirely facetious here either, even though I admit to a certain kinship with Brown (not in the success area), having been called a “hack” by no less than Pauline Kael in the pages of The New Yorker. Actually, she said “author of pop drivel,” basically the same thing. (Sorry, no link – this way pre-dates the Internet.) In any case, I still have my doubts about the merits of Baigent and Leigh’s case even though Brown admits to using the same structure for all his thrillers (so, frequently, did Aeschylus) and to using his wife as a researcher (like Will Durant). I can sympathize to a small extent with Baigent and Leigh, however, who woke up one day to find their relatively mundane ideas turned into a huge international bestseller. How could that be when their books sold fifty copies? Well, maybe it has something to do with character, pace, action, style, etc. Nobody that I know is forcing anybody to read The DaVinci Code, especially not members of Opus Dei.
What did Pauline Kael write, anyway? Those who can, do. Those who can’t, critique.
Jealousy is such a transparent motive.
Roger:
The novel was a fun read. The lawsuit was a joke and strictly a money grab. It was incredibly ironic that authors who tried to sell fiction as history in a non-fiction setting sued an author who tried to sell fiction as history in a fiction setting. Is the Da Vinci Code a important book? No. But it is hard to write a interesting and fun commercial novel and just because it won’t be remembered 100 years from now doesn’t mean Brown is a hack. His dream of being a historian or a theologian is never going to happen but he has done a fantastic job of marketing, and producing a page turner is a lot harder then the ” serious” literary critics think. If they could do it and make untold millions they would drop their pretensions and do it in a heartbeat.
BTW, whose portrait is that in the upper right hand corner of Mr. Hite’s website? It’s not by any chance Mohammed, is it?
Tom O’ Bedlam,
Mohammed? Nope, it’s some historical figure I’ve never learned the name of. You can ask Ken about it.
Ken has a long and abiding interest in “High Weirdness”. Conspiracy theories, cabals, hidden society, scientific anomalies, that sort of thing. One of the best works on cabals and conspiracies I’ve read is his GURPS Cabal (Steve Jackson Games), and he’s had a long running column (Suppressed Transmission) in Pyramid (an online roleplaying game magazine also from Steve Jackson Games). For a taste of the column get copies of the compilations Suppressed Transmission and Suppressed Transmission II (yep, Steve Jackson Games). BTW, all three books are available through the website.
BTW, those who can’t critique write pot-boilers. :p
What I love is that Baignet and Leigh have to pay Brown’s legal fees.If we had that system here we could knock out a lot of frivilous lawsuits.
I’m rather a fan of Aleister MacLean’s novels. Popcorn reading, but loved them, especially as a teen-ager, got started after seeing Ice Station Zebra one Saturday afternoon.
Some years after this, I read Nautilus 90 North, the story of the first passage by the USS Nautilus under the polar ice.
Guess where MacLean learned everything I he knew about submarines? You could pretty much track the two books together.
When you take a history book and write a story around the history, with your own characters and such, it’s called “research.” The Brits recognized this.
“Beginning artists borrow. Mature artists steal.” — T.S. Eliot
“Always steal from the best.” — David Drake
Roger — Longtime, first time, etc. Thanks for the link. It’s no doubt a mitzvah for you to step in and defend Dan Brown. (“When I was hungry, did you feed me? And when I wrote an awful, awful novel, did you say nice things about it anyhow?”)
Just to clear up a few stray points; I don’t believe B&L’s case had any merit — and what merit it might have had they managed to completely obscure by their halfwitted filing — but being named in a lawsuit by the deranged doesn’t make Dan Brown retroactively a good writer. He is inarguably a successful writer, but that’s a horse of another color. By his own admission, he’s a hack — so, as you point out, are other, much better writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite hack writer, for example, but the list goes on and on. (On the specific example you cite, I’m pretty sure Will Durant knew the titles and authors of the books Ariel was excerpting. He also put her name on the cover.)
Baigent & Leigh did sell something like 2 million copies of HBHG, which is impressive next to almost anyone — except Dan Brown. And for my money, they’re much better fiction writers than he will ever be.
Tom: The portrait on my journal is of the Italian-English archaeologist-circus strongman-hydrologist-impresario Giovanni Battista Belzoni.
Not to mention the fact that the entire story idea has been told in other books as well, “The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles” for example covers all these ideas in a historical fiction setting.
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